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（山西大学商务学院 山西太原 030000）
Abstract:This paper discusses the question of teaching of culture in EFL from three aspects:the necessity to teach, what to teach and how to teach. The article reviews briefly the reality of ELT in china, and introduces the importance of culture teaching in ELT in china by the relation between culture and ELT. It also states the contents of culture teaching. Then it further expounds the final objective is to achieve the language acquisition of English-learners through culture teaching.
中图分类号：Ｇ642．4 文献标识码：Ａ 文章编号：1673–1875（2007）01–079–03
I.Introduction
Researchers and practitioners have realized that the ultimate purpose of language teaching is to help students develop communicative competence (i.e. grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and strategic competence). As Brown (1994) points out, all these five aspects must work together for successful communication to take place. Spolsky (1989) proposes a necessary condition of dual knowledge for language learning, i.e. the acquisition of both language knowledge and skills in using that knowledge. In order to use the language knowledge appropriately, it is important for students to develop a culture awareness in communication.
Traditionally, much of the interest in foreign language teaching has long focused on the system of language itself, on the psycholinguistic aspects of learning and acquisition and on teaching techniques rather than on the teaching of culture. But studies show that in many cases communication failures are caused by a lack of cross-cultural understanding, rather than the absence of linguistic competence. As Irving (1986) points out ,when communicating with foreigners, native-speakers are quite forgiving about pronunciation and structure mistakes, but they are much less forgiving about violation of rules and routines of communication. Such violations are often considered to be impolite. Therefore, the teaching of a foreign language inevitably involves the teaching of foreign cultures. It is very important for a teacher to teach culture in ELT. And what and how to impart the cultural dimension of a non-native language in a class is still a great problem requiring more discussion and practice.
Ⅱ.Necessity of culture teaching in ELT
Reality:English language teaching in china has made unparalleled progress in recent years. Yet, various surveys conducted by Chinese scholars show clearly that our students are quite unable to communicate successfully with foreigners despite their accurate pronunciation, grammatical competence, and a good command of English vocabulary. They tend to consider customs of other countries in their own light, and frequently impose their own system of values on that of the target culture. Thus communication breakdown and even culture shock may occur. A common understanding reached now is that ELT in china should be oriented towards culture teaching to improve learners’ cultural communicative competence.
Objectives of ELT:The studies shows there are mainly two objectives in ELT. One is to help learners acquire and grasp some essential vocabulary and grammatical structure as a tool, not only for reading English newspaper, magazines, academic books, but also for writing essays, papers and academic reports in English. Another is to help learners remove their language obstacles, get to know another culture, enhance their communicative competence, improve their English knowledge and draw conscious attention to the similarities with and differences from the learners’ first language. That is, to develop the ability to use English effectively for purposes of practical communication.
Basically language teaching is related to bringing a target culture to learners, or, language learning is related to learning about another culture and acquiring knowledge of a target culture and an ability to communicate with native speakers. In order to achieve these objectives, it is important for teachers to teacher culture and foster and improve learners’ communicative competence in ELT.
The importance of culture teaching in ELT:
Second language learning is often second culture learning——Brown(1987)
In 1960 and American committee on language and culture expressed the relationships which. it regarded as essential in three statements.
1.Language is a part of culture, and must be approached with the same attitudes that govern our approach to culture as a whole. 2. Language conveys culture , so that the language teacher is also of necessity a teacher of a culture. 3. Language is itself subject to culturally conditioned attitudes and beliefs which can’t be ignored in the classroom.(Bishop,1960,source:stern,H. H. Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching.)
It is generally acknowledged that language and culture are closely associated with each other. One cannot hope to have a good command of a target language without adequate knowledge of the culture related to that language. In this sense acquisition of information about foreign culture is as important as language learning itself.
Ⅲ. Contents of culture teaching.
The contents of culture teaching usually includes two aspects:cultural knowledge information and cultural communication information. Lacking either of them, learners of different cultural levels may misunderstand the symbolic meaning and social meaning of words and produce pragmatic errors. Here is an example.
One day, an engineer invited a foreigner to his birthday party. Let’s look at their dialogue:
Foreigner:Your wife is very beautiful.
Engineer:Where? Where?
Foreigner:Everywhere.
Engineer:You can’t see.
The embarrassment caused above in the consequence of cultural differences that shape response to particular situations. When being complimented, English speakers would be likely to accept it by saying “thank you” or “I’m pleased to hear so” to show their pleasure and appreciation; while the Chinese would probably try not to accept the compliment to show their modesty and politeness.
In general the two aspects connect closely. The cultural knowledge information can be gained directly through “formal communicative approaches”(Ellis,R.1982),which are concerned with the product of communication, and the cultural communication information is gained gradually through “informal communication approaches” (Ellis,R.1982),which are concerned with the process of communicative. Those, who were born in certain social-culture circumstances and naturally inherited their own common culture can easily understand their ways of behavior and avoid misunderstanding. That is the reason why the English-learners cannot easily use their English knowledge to communicate even though they have learnt some history, geography and literature knowledge of the English-speaking countries. While communicating in foreign language, they are easily influenced and restricted by their native language, which is deeply rooted and works subconsciously even when learners become familiar with another culture. Another example:
Last year, one of my friends went to Canada. From his E-mail, I knew though he could catch the words by native-speakers, he couldn’t understand what the words really meant. And he also found it difficult to express himself in English, he didn’t know what to say and how, and what he had said was often not what he really wanted to express. He told me that his “self-esteem” was seriously damaged. Her failure, in fact, was that she ignored English cultural communication information while acquiring English cultural knowledge information.
As we know, cultural communication information is as important as (even more important than) cultural knowledge information in ELT . So in the improvement of communicative competence learners ought to focus more on cultural communication information. There is an urgent need to foster and improve learner’s communication competence instead of attaching too much importance to acquiring cultural knowledge information.
Ⅳ.Approaches adopted to culture teaching
Introducing foreign cultural background knowledge to learners:Information about foreign people, their ways of life, their countries and the achievements of their civilization is needed in EFL classroom. And they should consider how the information could be used to develop the learner’s ability to gain knowledge about foreign culture. The teachers should make the learners know the difference between foreign culture and the home culture and guide them to turn externally available knowledge into their own internal knowledge. For instance, in American usage, a restroom is a room in a theater, department, store or other building equipped with toilets ,and washbasins, etc., for the use of customers, employees, etc.; restroom is a polite term for bathroom or a toilet; the English equivalent for the Chinese 休息室might be lounge, or sometimes lobby.
Creating cultural environment for learners:The teacher should guide the students to participate in the community in its cultural environment .But this is unrealistic for most EFL learners in china. However, this dose not mean that a learner cannot be a “participant”. “classroom as culture”, as Breen (1985) calls it, is a real environment where the learner may begin to understand the foreign culture .The classroom is an artificially created cultural environment in which the learner’s internal social reality meets a different external reality. As Kramsch says,“in class ,culture is created and enacted through the dialogue between teacher and students, Through their dialogue, participants not only replicate a given context of culture, but because it takes place in a foreign language, it also has the potential of shaping a new culture”(Kramsch 1993:4).Of course ,the teachers can also motivate learners to participate in all kinds of English activities ,such as English poem recitations, oral English competitions, English program performances, etc.
Making comparisons between cultures:Teachers should make comparisons between cultures, which may help learners to understand foreign culture as well as their home culture on the basis of previous experience and new knowledge. It is noteworthy that comparison helps learners better understand the target culture of different cultural judgments. Comparison also helps learners explain different culture behavior, avoiding just explaining another’s behavior according to the learner’s own standards. Only by comparison can one distinguish the differences and improve the ability of distinguishing acceptable culture and unacceptable culture, thus preventing learners accepting the target culture uncritically.
In Chinese we often use “过”and “了”to refer to the past tense. But In English we should use the past tense such as, was, were or had and so on to refer to something that happened in the past. Another example:In Chinese, we say “体壮如牛”,while in English we call it “as strong as a horse”.
Adopting advanced teaching means:mass media such as film, novels and especially newspapers and magazines, are also considered an insightful means for teaching culture, for they reflect people’s way of life in terms of variety, contemporaneity and authenticity. Besides, audio-visual media materials and approaches, so different from the traditional chalk and black board method, are widely welcome due to their vivid presentation of both language and cultured knowledge based on authentic circumstances. Educationists have reacted with much imagination and enthusiasm in exploiting the capabilities of modern technology. Soon teachers believe that using media in the teaching of EFL in the classroom is certain to bring about a superior result. It helps to simplify the teaching/learning process and can help to perfect it. Moreover, it can bring in cultured input in a clear and realistic way as compared with traditional, media-free instruction.
According to the suggestion above, teaching knowledge about foreign culture in EFL education can strengthen a learner’s intellectual power since the learner changes from being ignorant to being knowledgeable. Thus the approaches can help to foster and improve learner’s cultural awareness and cultural understanding competence.
Ⅴ.Conclusion:
On the whole, the objectives of ELT and the relation between language and culture determines the necessity of culture teaching. It is necessary and urgent to teach not only cultural knowledge information but also cultural communication information as well. In this paper, some approaches are recommended to help English-learners foster learners’ cultural awareness and then to improve their cultural understand competence. Briefly, the final objective is to improve the language acquisition of English learners through culture teaching.
References
Bishop, H.H.1960. Fundamental concepts of Language Teaching.
Breen,M.1985. The social context for language learning:A neglected situation? Studies in Second Language Acquisition7/2:135-51
Brown H.D.1987 Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, New Jersey:Prentice Hall, Inc.
Brown, H.D.1994 Teaching by principles-An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:Prentice Hall Regents.
Irving, K.1986.Communicating in context. Englewood Ciffs, New Jersey:Prentice Hall Regents.
Kramsch, C. 1993. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford:Oxford University Press.
Robinson, G. L. N. 1985. Cross-cultural Understanding; Processes and Approaches for Foreign Language, English as a Second Language and Bilingual Educators. New York; Pergamon Press.
Spolsky, B.1989.Conditions for second Language Learning. Oxford University Press.
Abstract:This paper discusses the question of teaching of culture in EFL from three aspects:the necessity to teach, what to teach and how to teach. The article reviews briefly the reality of ELT in china, and introduces the importance of culture teaching in ELT in china by the relation between culture and ELT. It also states the contents of culture teaching. Then it further expounds the final objective is to achieve the language acquisition of English-learners through culture teaching.
中图分类号：Ｇ642．4 文献标识码：Ａ 文章编号：1673–1875（2007）01–079–03
I.Introduction
Researchers and practitioners have realized that the ultimate purpose of language teaching is to help students develop communicative competence (i.e. grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, pragmatic and strategic competence). As Brown (1994) points out, all these five aspects must work together for successful communication to take place. Spolsky (1989) proposes a necessary condition of dual knowledge for language learning, i.e. the acquisition of both language knowledge and skills in using that knowledge. In order to use the language knowledge appropriately, it is important for students to develop a culture awareness in communication.
Traditionally, much of the interest in foreign language teaching has long focused on the system of language itself, on the psycholinguistic aspects of learning and acquisition and on teaching techniques rather than on the teaching of culture. But studies show that in many cases communication failures are caused by a lack of cross-cultural understanding, rather than the absence of linguistic competence. As Irving (1986) points out ,when communicating with foreigners, native-speakers are quite forgiving about pronunciation and structure mistakes, but they are much less forgiving about violation of rules and routines of communication. Such violations are often considered to be impolite. Therefore, the teaching of a foreign language inevitably involves the teaching of foreign cultures. It is very important for a teacher to teach culture in ELT. And what and how to impart the cultural dimension of a non-native language in a class is still a great problem requiring more discussion and practice.
Ⅱ.Necessity of culture teaching in ELT
Reality:English language teaching in china has made unparalleled progress in recent years. Yet, various surveys conducted by Chinese scholars show clearly that our students are quite unable to communicate successfully with foreigners despite their accurate pronunciation, grammatical competence, and a good command of English vocabulary. They tend to consider customs of other countries in their own light, and frequently impose their own system of values on that of the target culture. Thus communication breakdown and even culture shock may occur. A common understanding reached now is that ELT in china should be oriented towards culture teaching to improve learners’ cultural communicative competence.
Objectives of ELT:The studies shows there are mainly two objectives in ELT. One is to help learners acquire and grasp some essential vocabulary and grammatical structure as a tool, not only for reading English newspaper, magazines, academic books, but also for writing essays, papers and academic reports in English. Another is to help learners remove their language obstacles, get to know another culture, enhance their communicative competence, improve their English knowledge and draw conscious attention to the similarities with and differences from the learners’ first language. That is, to develop the ability to use English effectively for purposes of practical communication.
Basically language teaching is related to bringing a target culture to learners, or, language learning is related to learning about another culture and acquiring knowledge of a target culture and an ability to communicate with native speakers. In order to achieve these objectives, it is important for teachers to teacher culture and foster and improve learners’ communicative competence in ELT.
The importance of culture teaching in ELT:
Second language learning is often second culture learning——Brown(1987)
In 1960 and American committee on language and culture expressed the relationships which. it regarded as essential in three statements.
1.Language is a part of culture, and must be approached with the same attitudes that govern our approach to culture as a whole. 2. Language conveys culture , so that the language teacher is also of necessity a teacher of a culture. 3. Language is itself subject to culturally conditioned attitudes and beliefs which can’t be ignored in the classroom.(Bishop,1960,source:stern,H. H. Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching.)
It is generally acknowledged that language and culture are closely associated with each other. One cannot hope to have a good command of a target language without adequate knowledge of the culture related to that language. In this sense acquisition of information about foreign culture is as important as language learning itself.
Ⅲ. Contents of culture teaching.
The contents of culture teaching usually includes two aspects:cultural knowledge information and cultural communication information. Lacking either of them, learners of different cultural levels may misunderstand the symbolic meaning and social meaning of words and produce pragmatic errors. Here is an example.
One day, an engineer invited a foreigner to his birthday party. Let’s look at their dialogue:
Foreigner:Your wife is very beautiful.
Engineer:Where? Where?
Foreigner:Everywhere.
Engineer:You can’t see.
The embarrassment caused above in the consequence of cultural differences that shape response to particular situations. When being complimented, English speakers would be likely to accept it by saying “thank you” or “I’m pleased to hear so” to show their pleasure and appreciation; while the Chinese would probably try not to accept the compliment to show their modesty and politeness.
In general the two aspects connect closely. The cultural knowledge information can be gained directly through “formal communicative approaches”(Ellis,R.1982),which are concerned with the product of communication, and the cultural communication information is gained gradually through “informal communication approaches” (Ellis,R.1982),which are concerned with the process of communicative. Those, who were born in certain social-culture circumstances and naturally inherited their own common culture can easily understand their ways of behavior and avoid misunderstanding. That is the reason why the English-learners cannot easily use their English knowledge to communicate even though they have learnt some history, geography and literature knowledge of the English-speaking countries. While communicating in foreign language, they are easily influenced and restricted by their native language, which is deeply rooted and works subconsciously even when learners become familiar with another culture. Another example:
Last year, one of my friends went to Canada. From his E-mail, I knew though he could catch the words by native-speakers, he couldn’t understand what the words really meant. And he also found it difficult to express himself in English, he didn’t know what to say and how, and what he had said was often not what he really wanted to express. He told me that his “self-esteem” was seriously damaged. Her failure, in fact, was that she ignored English cultural communication information while acquiring English cultural knowledge information.
As we know, cultural communication information is as important as (even more important than) cultural knowledge information in ELT . So in the improvement of communicative competence learners ought to focus more on cultural communication information. There is an urgent need to foster and improve learner’s communication competence instead of attaching too much importance to acquiring cultural knowledge information.
Ⅳ.Approaches adopted to culture teaching
Introducing foreign cultural background knowledge to learners:Information about foreign people, their ways of life, their countries and the achievements of their civilization is needed in EFL classroom. And they should consider how the information could be used to develop the learner’s ability to gain knowledge about foreign culture. The teachers should make the learners know the difference between foreign culture and the home culture and guide them to turn externally available knowledge into their own internal knowledge. For instance, in American usage, a restroom is a room in a theater, department, store or other building equipped with toilets ,and washbasins, etc., for the use of customers, employees, etc.; restroom is a polite term for bathroom or a toilet; the English equivalent for the Chinese 休息室might be lounge, or sometimes lobby.
Creating cultural environment for learners:The teacher should guide the students to participate in the community in its cultural environment .But this is unrealistic for most EFL learners in china. However, this dose not mean that a learner cannot be a “participant”. “classroom as culture”, as Breen (1985) calls it, is a real environment where the learner may begin to understand the foreign culture .The classroom is an artificially created cultural environment in which the learner’s internal social reality meets a different external reality. As Kramsch says,“in class ,culture is created and enacted through the dialogue between teacher and students, Through their dialogue, participants not only replicate a given context of culture, but because it takes place in a foreign language, it also has the potential of shaping a new culture”(Kramsch 1993:4).Of course ,the teachers can also motivate learners to participate in all kinds of English activities ,such as English poem recitations, oral English competitions, English program performances, etc.
Making comparisons between cultures:Teachers should make comparisons between cultures, which may help learners to understand foreign culture as well as their home culture on the basis of previous experience and new knowledge. It is noteworthy that comparison helps learners better understand the target culture of different cultural judgments. Comparison also helps learners explain different culture behavior, avoiding just explaining another’s behavior according to the learner’s own standards. Only by comparison can one distinguish the differences and improve the ability of distinguishing acceptable culture and unacceptable culture, thus preventing learners accepting the target culture uncritically.
In Chinese we often use “过”and “了”to refer to the past tense. But In English we should use the past tense such as, was, were or had and so on to refer to something that happened in the past. Another example:In Chinese, we say “体壮如牛”,while in English we call it “as strong as a horse”.
Adopting advanced teaching means:mass media such as film, novels and especially newspapers and magazines, are also considered an insightful means for teaching culture, for they reflect people’s way of life in terms of variety, contemporaneity and authenticity. Besides, audio-visual media materials and approaches, so different from the traditional chalk and black board method, are widely welcome due to their vivid presentation of both language and cultured knowledge based on authentic circumstances. Educationists have reacted with much imagination and enthusiasm in exploiting the capabilities of modern technology. Soon teachers believe that using media in the teaching of EFL in the classroom is certain to bring about a superior result. It helps to simplify the teaching/learning process and can help to perfect it. Moreover, it can bring in cultured input in a clear and realistic way as compared with traditional, media-free instruction.
According to the suggestion above, teaching knowledge about foreign culture in EFL education can strengthen a learner’s intellectual power since the learner changes from being ignorant to being knowledgeable. Thus the approaches can help to foster and improve learner’s cultural awareness and cultural understanding competence.
Ⅴ.Conclusion:
On the whole, the objectives of ELT and the relation between language and culture determines the necessity of culture teaching. It is necessary and urgent to teach not only cultural knowledge information but also cultural communication information as well. In this paper, some approaches are recommended to help English-learners foster learners’ cultural awareness and then to improve their cultural understand competence. Briefly, the final objective is to improve the language acquisition of English learners through culture teaching.
References
Bishop, H.H.1960. Fundamental concepts of Language Teaching.
Breen,M.1985. The social context for language learning:A neglected situation? Studies in Second Language Acquisition7/2:135-51
Brown H.D.1987 Principles of Language Learning and Teaching, New Jersey:Prentice Hall, Inc.
Brown, H.D.1994 Teaching by principles-An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:Prentice Hall Regents.
Irving, K.1986.Communicating in context. Englewood Ciffs, New Jersey:Prentice Hall Regents.
Kramsch, C. 1993. Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford:Oxford University Press.
Robinson, G. L. N. 1985. Cross-cultural Understanding; Processes and Approaches for Foreign Language, English as a Second Language and Bilingual Educators. New York; Pergamon Press.
Spolsky, B.1989.Conditions for second Language Learning. Oxford University Press.